The Harem Midwife (7 page)

“And if she is not a virgin?” Hannah asked.

Mustafa unlocked the door of a small room. “The dock
workers and sailors are not fussy about where they plow and cast their seed. Off to a brothel she will go.”

Hannah had seen the pox-ridden, half-starved girls in cages by the docks. She would not wish such a fate on anyone.

Her concern must have showed on her face, for Mustafa said, “Do not look so worried. The exam is a formality, I assure you. Leah is not more than fourteen, I would guess.” He smiled. “The Sultan caught a glimpse of this little peasant when she was brought in yesterday and has talked of nothing since. She is a
gözde
, a girl in the eye of the Sultan. Hence the urgency.”

Mustafa held open the door of the room. He gestured her in, then looked around. It took a moment for Hannah to realize she was in the dormitory where they kept the newly arrived girls, a spartan room, dimly lit, but no doubt much more comfortable than the simple hut the girl had probably grown up in.

“I have moved the other odalisques to another dormitory so we may have privacy,” said Mustafa. “Leah?” he called.

A slim shaft of moonlight entered through a high clerestory window framed with gossamer curtains swishing in the breeze. When Hannah’s eyes adjusted, she saw a sleeping mat rolled up neatly on the floor. Stacked in the corner were a stool, a divan, a prayer rug, and a scattering of cushions, one of which had been slashed. A flurry of goose feathers floated in the air. Through the high window drifted the fragrance of jasmine and roses from the palace gardens.

“Where is she?”

Mustafa touched his pine-pitch torch to a candle in the wall sconce, sending an arabesque of smoke to the ceiling, where it flattened and dispersed like a low-hanging cloud. “Where, indeed?”

The scent of rancid beef tallow filled the room. No expensive beeswax candles in this quarter of the harem. Hannah glanced at the ceiling but saw only the timbers. She squinted, searching the corners of the room.

Mustafa spied the girl first. He gestured to the window far above his head. Crouched on the ledge, half hidden by the billowing curtains, was a form radiating predatory stillness. It took Hannah a moment to realize she was looking at a girl and not a wild animal. Her eyes were opened wide in terror. Her hands curled around the window ledge. Behind the fear was the determined aggression of a creature that has been cornered, a creature expecting brutality and therefore coiled to spring. God knows what she had been through thus far in her short life.

Mustafa pulled the stool under the ledge and climbed on it. He teetered as he stretched up to grasp the girl’s thin, muscular leg. Hannah held her breath, afraid he would give a sharp yank and bring the child crashing to the floor. Instead, he murmured soft words of encouragement as though coaxing a kitten out of a tree. The girl shrank farther back onto the ledge, one hand reaching behind her to clutch the iron grille. Mustafa continued making cooing sounds. Moving closer, his face upturned, he reached up again to seize her leg. She kicked at him with a determined little foot. Mustafa’s turban toppled off. The
aigrette
, the
elaborate filigreed gold pin set with rubies and diamonds that held his turban in place, came loose, and the turban and quill clattered to the floor. A muscle twitched in Mustafa’s cheek as he climbed down from the stool and bent to retrieve his turban and quill. No doubt he was regretting that he had not forced a gold-foiled opium pill between the girl’s lips after she first arrived.

“Mustafa, let me try,” said Hannah, but Mustafa replaced his turban on his head, squared his shoulders, mounted the stool again, and extended a hand up to the girl.

For his forbearance, he was rewarded by the sound of a throat being cleared and then a splat of saliva on his cheek. This insult was followed by a stream of curse words in Hebrew and instructions on what Mustafa could do with his quill.

God my rock, protect me, Hannah thought. This girl, who seemed more suited for the Sultan’s menagerie than his couch, was a daughter of Israel. For a Jewish girl to speak so was an embarrassment for all Jews. It was Hannah’s conceit—she supposed that was the right word—to believe that Jews acted better than gentiles and better than Muslims.
Judge not that thee be not judged
, as one of her gentile neighbours would say. The words echoed in Hannah’s mind. Leah must have suffered greatly to act in this way. Sympathy would serve better than a sharp reproof.

In Hebrew, Hannah called up, “You are lucky Mustafa did not understand what you invited him to do with his quill.”

The girl gave a snort. “You speak Hebrew?”

“I would not be much of a Jew if I did not.”

Again in Hebrew, Leah shouted at Mustafa. “May hyenas crawl up your asshole and eat their way to your throat!”

He got off his stool and backed away from the window ledge, then looked at Hannah.

Hannah, pretending not to understand what had been said, took a cloth from her bag and gave it to Mustafa to wipe his cheek. Then he got back up on the stool and this time lunged for the girl. Quick as a snake, his fingers wrapped around her ankles. Leah struggled against his hold, lashing out, thrashing and bucking. A smell of sweat wafted down, the acrid scent of an animal fighting for its life. Mustafa held fast. Hannah could not look. She did not want to see the girl fall and hear her land with a thud on the stone floor.

When she heard nothing but the growls and the grunts of a struggle, Hannah finally turned. The girl had lost her grip on the grille of the window. Now her fingers were curled around the curtains. Mustafa was bent over, still balancing on the stool, his hands braced on his knees, panting.

“I am too old for such antics. I shall call a couple of eunuchs. They will subdue her before she harms either herself or us. If that does not succeed, there are always the Janissaries.” The Janissaries were the elite private corps of soldiers who guarded the Sultan. They would lose no time in hauling the child unceremoniously to the floor and packing her off to the prison cells under the slaves’ hospital.

“Give me a chance,” said Hannah. “Leave me with her a moment.”

Mustafa stepped down from the stool. “May Allah be with you.” Then he bowed and backed out of the room.

Hannah heard him turn the key in the lock as he left.

Why must Mustafa lock her in? She had had a horror of being locked in small rooms ever since she was a child and heard the story of a man, thought to be dead, who had been thrown into a coffin, the lid fastened shut, and buried alive. The beating of fists could be heard several houses away but no one dared come to his aid. Now she knew how this man had felt.

Just as she was about to take Mustafa’s place on the stool, something landed on her head. The girl was flinging what looked like a cloud of filaments onto the floor. Yarn? Shreds of her garment? Charred lamp wicks that a lazy servant had tucked along the window ledge?

The girl’s face appeared from behind the curtain. Hannah saw large, wide-spaced eyes staring down at her. Green, the green of the sea, the green of the first trees to bud in spring. Green eyes in a land of black-eyed women. Not even the Valide herself could claim this distinction. The girl was indeed extraordinary.

On Leah’s face was the look of both predator and prey, of falcon and rabbit. Her gaze never left Hannah’s face. Hannah knelt and scooped up a handful of the strange substance from the floor. It was hair. Long, lovely, shiny strands, as glossy and black as a horse’s mane.

When Hannah looked up again, Leah’s eyes were still on her. There was the glint of iron. In her hand, Leah held a knife.

THE SMELL OF
death made Cesca giddy. It had a sweetish odour rather like the water in a vase of lilies that had not been changed for several days. The windows in the bedchamber were too narrow to admit a breeze. The oil lamps sucked all the air from the room. For what Francesca—or as most people called her, Cesca—had in mind, none of these details made the slightest difference.

Inside were all the women, including Cesca and the widow, Grazia. Outside in the garden were the male mourners—Jews clad in shades of black and grey, curls hanging down on either side of their faces, beards showing the
remnants of last night’s soup, their skin colourless from too much time in the prayer house.

All except for one man.

Like a white heron among a flock of crows stood Foscari, the nobleman from Venice—tall, fair, blue-eyed, and beardless. There was a deliberate grace to him, an economy of movement as he stooped to listen to something the rabbi was saying, cupping his hand behind his ear as though he were hard of hearing, although Cesca knew he was not. And then there was the matter of his nose—silver, attached by silk threads wrapped around his ears, flashing in the intermittent rays of the sun.

Why, she wondered, would a gentile trouble himself to attend the funeral of a Jew? And not just any gentile but a marquis. And not just any marquis but the Venetian ambassador to Constantinople. Surely such a man must have better things to do than attend the funeral of an obscure moneylender.

In a semicircle around the bed, Cesca stood with the other women who were darting glances at Grazia, waiting for her to approach the corpse and begin the ablutions—wash the body, stuff the ears, nose and mouth with cotton wool, tie the ankles, cross the hands on his breast, and wrap him in a shroud. The widow Grazia should step forward and begin the task, but she did not.

“I cannot, Cesca,” Grazia finally said, turning to her. “You must do what has to be done.”

“As you wish,” Cesca replied, approaching the bed. To her relief, none of the other women moved toward the body to
help her. This would make it easier to carry out her plan. “Go outside, all of you. I will look after him.” She had almost said “it.”
I will look after it
. That was all he was now—no longer Leon, no longer human, no longer anything but an unpleasant household task to be performed.

The women hesitated. They stood for a moment, their arms at their sides.

Cesca put an arm around Grazia’s shoulders and gave her a nudge toward the door. “Go. I can manage.”

The other women took Grazia by the arm and trooped out to the garden, where they stood apart from the male mourners. Cesca locked the door behind them.

With Grazia and the other women gone, she would have the solitude she needed to wash and wrap the body. It amused her to remember that this morning when she threw cloths over the mirrors, a custom required when sitting
shiva
, the period of mourning, she had noticed that even after everything she had done, her eyes remained as guileless as lapis lazuli.

Leon had died young. His black beard, without a hint of white, reached the middle of his well-fleshed chest. Death had scrubbed the colour from his face and left it a dull grey. He wore a prayer shawl, black frock coat, and breeches.

Cesca had donned a stained wool skirt this morning, knowing what lay ahead. She would not sacrifice her good dress. The rabbi would perform
keriah
, using a knife and slitting her mourner’s clothes, not on a seam that could be mended but in the middle of the cloth, making it unwearable.

This was the way of Jews. Cesca had studied their habits well. For two years she had worked for Leon and Grazia as the “Shabbat goy,” performing chores forbidden to be done by Jews—extinguishing candles and lamps on Friday night, lighting the fire on Sabbath morning. The services she had performed for Leon’s sole benefit she preferred not to dwell upon.

Jews were profligate in some ways: two sets of pots and dishes to keep milk from mingling with meat, and costly beeswax candles wasted squinting over books. But they seemed to Cesca miserly in other ways—refusing to buy fresh cherries in July, walking thousands of paces out of their way to save a
scudo
on a pail of goat’s milk.

Grazia was not like this. She had been a Christian, the blue-eyed daughter of a baker, who had fallen in love with Leon when she was fifteen and, to her family’s horror, converted to Judaism.

Was Foscari acquainted with the custom of
keriah
? Through the open window, she glanced into the garden, searching in the crowd of men for his well-barbered head of sleek chestnut hair. Evidently not. He was wearing his handsome white jacket, buttoned in spite of the heat, not a bead of sweat on his brow. She looked away when she saw him gazing at her, but not before she observed one blue eye close in a wink. Something stirred in her. It had been a long time since she had had a well-made man in her bed. Had she known what lay in store for her at Foscari’s hands, she would not have given a long, sensual wink in reply.

Cesca closed the window and turned to the task at hand. She would make quick work of Leon, then the men would lift him onto a palanquin and carry him down the hill to the Jewish graveyard outside of town. While Leon was being released into the waiting arms of his pagan god, Cesca would help herself to what she was after in his study.

She took a step toward the bed, leaned over the corpse, and lifted its arm. Taking a deep breath, she began to undress him—yanking off his white
tallis
, his prayer shawl, tugging off the black gabardine breeches, and jerking him out of his jacket. Even in death, his body repulsed her—the long feet splayed outward, the fingers curled up at his sides. She tossed a sheet over the corpse and dipped a cloth in a bowl of warm soapy water, then wrung it out so that it was nearly dry. She wrapped it around her hand like a glove. Nudging aside a corner of the sheet, she picked up an arm and began to wash it with purposeful strokes.